Twitter Search API: 20/Page + Full Long Posts

A Twitter search API call against SocialCrawl returns about 20 keyword matches per page, with sort=latest or sort=top, and long posts come back as full bodies — not a 280-character clamp. On 2026-09-04 we searched NASA Artemis (sort=latest) and got 20 hits; 12 of 20 exceeded 280 characters, and the longest (@NASAStennis) was 1,173.

The same API key also cursor-pages user timelines, tweet replies, retweeters, followers, following, the media tab, and account search — each at 1 credit per page (account search is a fixed single page). Everything below is real curl plus trimmed JSON from that harvest against @nasa and a live NASA spacewalk thread. Ten successful calls, 10 credits.

This is a measured walkthrough — not the X API pricing field guide, not the scrape-from-scratch tutorial, and not a multi-provider matrix.

What can one API key pull from X right now?

The September 2026 X wave added seven new reads, and user timelines now paginate. Observed page sizes from this harvest:

Endpoint	Page size this pull	Cursor?
/v1/twitter/user/tweets	13	yes
/v1/twitter/search/tweets	20	yes
/v1/twitter/tweet/replies	36	yes
/v1/twitter/tweet/retweeters	20	yes
/v1/twitter/user/followers	70	yes
/v1/twitter/user/following	67	yes
/v1/twitter/user/media	19	yes
/v1/twitter/search/users	10	no

Billing is uniform: 1 credit per page. Empty-reply tweets are refunded (credits_used: 0). We did not hit that path this run — the parent we picked had replies.

Page sizes are source-set and can drift; cite them as "this pull," not as hard guarantees. A previously measured walk of @nasa returned 174 posts over 9 pages; this harvest proves the cursor mechanism over two pages, not that full walk.

Honest field gaps on this surface: follower / following / retweeter rows carry verified: null (not false); media-tab posts omit view and bookmark counts; account search returns no follower counts.

Does the Twitter search API support latest and top results?

Yes. GET /v1/twitter/search/tweets takes a query string and sort=latest|top. Operators such as since:, from:, and quoted phrases live inside query — matching X's documented search operators.

curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/search/tweets?query=NASA%20Artemis&sort=latest"

Trimmed response from the 2026-09-04 harvest (req-A75WeV786f4GThYw, 1 credit). The live envelope is { success, data: { items }, pagination } — pagination sits next to data, not inside it. Page had 20 items, has_more=true. Featured long post from that page (@NASAStennis, full body on post.content.text):

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "post": {
          "id": "2095617131295486161",
          "url": "https://x.com/NASAStennis/status/2095617131295486161",
          "published_at": "2026-09-03T20:57:13.000Z",
          "author": { "username": "NASAStennis" },
          "engagement": {
            "views": 986,
            "likes": 35,
            "comments": 1,
            "shares": 7,
            "saves": 2
          },
          "content": {
            "text": "Artemis II crew brings Moon Joy to NASA Stennis! 🚀\n\nNASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen visited us on Thursday, Sept. 3, to celebrate the historic @NASAArtemis II test flight around the Moon.\n\nAs the first astronauts to fly aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the crew traveled farther in space than humans have ever before.\n\nDuring their visit to Stennis, they stopped at the Fred Haise Test Stand, where rigorous RS-25 engine testing ensures our astronauts fly safely on NASA’s SLS rocket.\n\nThe crew thanked everyone for tackling hard challenges and reminded us during an employee event: “You put humans in space.”\n\nToday provided a great reminder for all: Whether you work at America’s largest rocket propulsion test site or look up at the Moon from your backyard, you are a part of America’s return to the Moon.\n\nAnd the Artemis II mission is just the beginning!\n\nNext comes Artemis III with a mission intended to demonstrate integrated operations between the Orion spacecraft and test versions of commercial human landing systems before Artemis IV returns astronauts to the lunar surface."
          }
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "pagination": { "has_more": true, "page_size": 20, "next_cursor": "…" },
  "credits_used": 1
}

sort=latest is chronological; sort=top ranks by engagement. The important part for RAG ingest and monitoring: long posts come back in full — not truncated to 280. SocialCrawl puts the full body on post.content.text. We counted 1,173 characters on that Stennis post (String.length / UTF-16); there is no text_length field on the wire.

Text lengths on this Artemis page: 224, 302, 117, 330, 1137, 299, 285, 94, 208, 1173, 751, 258, 347, 140, 292, 270, 101, 650, 294, 364 — 12 of 20 over 280.

How does Twitter API pagination work with cursors?

Pass the envelope's pagination.next_cursor from page n back as the cursor query param on page n+1. Stop when pagination.has_more is false. That object is a sibling of data, not a child of it. Each page costs 1 credit.

# page 1
curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/user/tweets?handle=nasa"

# page 2 — paste pagination.next_cursor from page 1
curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/user/tweets?handle=nasa&cursor=CURSOR"

Live two-page walk of @nasa (2026-09-04):

	Page 1	Page 2
Items	13	13
Newest published_at	2026-09-03T21:13:15Z	2026-08-31T18:22:20Z
Oldest on page	2026-08-31T21:34:46Z	2026-08-30T10:20:09Z
has_more	true	true
Id overlap	—	0

Newest-first chronology holds across the cursor: page 2 starts older than page 1 ends, with zero shared ids. Official X API v2 uses the same opaque-token idea (next_token → pagination_token) for list endpoints (docs.x.com pagination); SocialCrawl exposes it as pagination.next_cursor / cursor on the unified envelope.

Sample non-RT from page 1 (data.items[n].post):

{
  "post": {
    "id": "2095585125627003244",
    "url": "https://x.com/NASA/status/2095585125627003244",
    "published_at": "2026-09-03T18:50:02.000Z",
    "author": { "username": "NASA", "verified": true },
    "engagement": {
      "views": 346164,
      "likes": 1461,
      "comments": 82,
      "shares": 205,
      "saves": 57
    },
    "flags": { "pinned": false },
    "content": {
      "text": "An uncrewed Progress cargo spacecraft carrying food, fuel, and supplies is scheduled to lift off on a two-day flight to the @Space_Station on Wednesday, Sept. 9.\n\nWe will be broadcasting its launch and arrival live. How to tune in: https://go.nasa.gov/4gzfYyG https://t.co/JOKpBt3VME"
    }
  }
}

post.flags.pinned is present on every item. This harvest had no pinned tweet on either page (all false) — absence of a true pin does not mean the field is missing. The earlier product measurement of 174 posts over 9 pages still stands as a prior walk; the two pages above are what this run proved.

How do you fetch tweet replies and retweeters via API?

Conversation reconstruction needs two reads on the same parent URL.

Replies arrive as a CommentList — not nested inside the parent post:

curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/tweet/replies?url=https://x.com/NASA/status/2094742199736926232"

Field	Value this pull
Parent	2094742199736926232 (417 comments on the parent engagement metric)
Items	36
has_more	true
Credits	1

{
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "comment": {
          "id": "2094773667884347874",
          "parent_id": "2094742199736926232",
          "author": { "username": "NASA", "verified": true },
          "engagement": { "likes": 509, "replies": 26 },
          "text": "@Astro_Jessica @Soph_astro Time for the spacewalk! Astronauts @Soph_astro and @astro_jessica have begun their busy day installing and replacing hardware on the @Space_Station. https://t.co/iAC6E7Ul62"
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "pagination": { "has_more": true, "page_size": 36, "next_cursor": "…" },
  "credits_used": 1
}

Replies are the Comment archetype: the body is comment.text, not post.content.text.

Retweeters use the same parent and return an AuthorList (~20/page this pull, cursor present). First row this page: ravenclawdegrl (23 followers, joined 2016-07-20). Every row had author.verified: null — write null, not false.

Endpoint	Page size	Shape	verified
/v1/twitter/tweet/replies	36	CommentList	populated on reply authors
/v1/twitter/tweet/retweeters	20	AuthorList	null on every row this page

Empty-reply parents refund the credit. We did not hit that path — the spacewalk thread had replies.

How do you get Twitter followers, following, media, and accounts?

Four more reads, one credit each.

Followers — @nasa, 70/page, cursor present. Sample first row: SpaceX (41,900,244 followers). verified is null on every row this page.

curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/user/followers?handle=nasa"

{
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "author": {
          "id": "34743251",
          "username": "SpaceX",
          "display_name": "SpaceX",
          "verified": null,
          "followers": 41900244,
          "following": 127,
          "posts_count": 11701,
          "joined_at": "2009-04-23",
          "bio": "SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft"
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "pagination": { "has_more": true, "page_size": 70, "next_cursor": "…" },
  "credits_used": 1
}

Following — @nasa, 67/page. First ten usernames this pull: NASAHubble, NASAWebb, Space_Station, esa, NASAArtemis, NASAEarth, NASAJPL, NASAJohnson, NASAUniverse, NASAMars. Same verified: null caveat as followers.

Media tab — @nasa, 19 photo/video posts/page, cursor present. engagement.views and engagement.saves are null on every item. Use /v1/twitter/user/tweets or /v1/twitter/tweet when those metrics matter.

Account search — query=nasa returned 10 matches, one page, no cursor (has_more=false, next_cursor absent). Verification is populated here (official accounts show true); follower / following / posts counts are null. Use it as typeahead to resolve handles before spending timeline or follower credits.

curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/search/users?query=nasa"

#	Username	Display	Verified
1	NASA	NASA	true
2	NASAHubble	Hubble	true
3	NASAEarth	NASA Earth	true
4	NASAJPL	NASAJPL	true
5	NASAWebb	NASA Webb Telescope	true

(…plus NASAKennedy, NASASolarSystem, NASAPersevere, nasahqphoto, NASAJohnson — ten total, then stop.)

How do you start calling these endpoints?

1. Get an API key at socialcrawl.dev (free credits on signup; no card for the free tier).
2. Export it and hit either search or a timeline page:

export SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY=sc_your_key_here

curl -s -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY" \
  "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/search/tweets?query=NASA%20Artemis&sort=latest"

3. Paste an X URL into the Visual Explorer if you want to see the response shape before writing a loop.
4. Read the Twitter platform reference and the API quickstart for the full endpoint list and auth model.

For pricing math on the official X API, see the X (Twitter) API 2026 field guide. For an end-to-end scrape walkthrough (profile → tweets → cursor loop), see How to Scrape Twitter (X) in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

How does Twitter API pagination / cursor paging work?

List endpoints return pagination.has_more and pagination.next_cursor. Pass that cursor back as the cursor query parameter on the next request. Stop when has_more is false. On 2026-09-04, @nasa timeline page 1 returned 13 posts and page 2 returned 13 older posts with zero id overlap — both pages still had has_more=true.

How do I get more than one page of a user's tweets?

Call GET /v1/twitter/user/tweets?handle=…, read pagination.next_cursor, then call again with &cursor=…. Each page is 1 credit. A previously measured walk returned 174 posts over 9 pages; this harvest walked two pages to prove the cursor.

Does the Twitter search API support latest and top results?

Yes. Pass sort=latest for chronological results or sort=top for engagement ranking on GET /v1/twitter/search/tweets. The Artemis sort=latest call returned 20 items with a cursor for the next page.

How do I fetch Twitter replies via an API?

GET /v1/twitter/tweet/replies?url=… returns a CommentList. The NASA spacewalk parent returned 36 replies on page 1 with has_more=true. Empty-reply parents are refunded (credits_used: 0).

How do I get Twitter followers (and following) programmatically?

GET /v1/twitter/user/followers?handle=… returned 70/page for @nasa; /v1/twitter/user/following returned 67/page. Both cursor-paginate at 1 credit/page. On these surfaces author.verified is null — account search is the read that populates verification.

Can an API return full-length tweets over 280 characters?

Yes on this surface. Of 20 Artemis search hits, 12 exceeded 280 characters; the longest (@NASAStennis) was 1,173. The body lands on post.content.text — not a truncated preview.

How do I call the Twitter search API from Python?

import os, requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/twitter/search/tweets",
    params={"query": "NASA Artemis", "sort": "latest"},
    headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
r.raise_for_status()
page = r.json()
print(len(page["data"]["items"]), page["pagination"])

Same envelope as curl. Loop on page["pagination"]["next_cursor"] the same way you would for timelines. pagination is a sibling of data.

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Docs and the live surface: /docs/quickstart · /platforms/twitter.